


like stars colliding; like coming home

by petrichor (findingkairos)



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: #khrrarepairweek2018, Alternate Universe - Dragons, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Alternate Universe - Supernatural, Angels, F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Handcuffs, Implied Brainwashing (none actually happens), Implied Medical Experimentation, Kidnapping, LGBTQ Female Character of Color, LGBTQ Themes, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Past Violence, Pining, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Unreliable Narrator, Unrequited Crush, mild violence, no betas we die like individuals who put way too much stock into being macho, rated t for cursing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-23 11:23:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 13,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14933301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/findingkairos/pseuds/petrichor
Summary: Whatever the universe, whatever the circumstance, somehow fate manages to push the two together.(A collection of eight prompt fills for the KHR Rarepair Week of 2018.)





	1. the best things in life (are things we can't have)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 1 - Storm: **Soulmate AU** | ~~Body Disposal~~
> 
> Tags/Warnings: Pining, Non-happy ending

It’s not until after Hana blinks the brightness from her eyes that she realizes she can see the world in color. From the amount of blinking that the other girl does - a color that is most definitely not gray - she’s not the only one.

“Wait, so–” the girl starts. Hana doesn’t wait for her to finish; she turns on her heel and walks away, as best as she can without tripping over the grass or the sky or the shirt that the boy across the street is wearing.

She doesn’t look behind her, even when there’s a frantic, “Wait, wait a minute!” She doesn’t. She _can’t_.

Hana doesn’t want to know the chances of actually finding your soulmate. The world is big and the number of people in it is even bigger. Not everyone finds the person who will make the world explode into color; people who marry their soulmate are lucky. So incredibly lucky.

Lucky things like this don’t happen to Hana. The only explanation - the only _logical_ explanation - is that there’s something wrong. She’s young, but she’s not young enough to never have heard the horror stories of the colors disappearing. Of the world seeping from varied hues - whatever they are, Hana thinks, eyeing her own shirt - back into the grayscale that everyone starts out with.

So if Hana ignores it, then maybe it’ll go away.

The girl tries to talk to her in class. Hana doesn’t look at her, keeping her gaze to the front. They’re learning more kanji today, and it’s _important_ , so she needs to pay attention and memorize them, no matter how much the other kids staring holes into her back make her uncomfortable.

Eventually the girl gives up and returns to her seat. Eventually she stops trying to catch her attention during lunch, in the middle of class, after school.

The world stays colored; Hana refuses to learn the names of any of them. Her father stays only mildly disappointed in her, and Hana breathes in deep and tries to convince herself that it is worth it. That it’s worth having _this_ – ‘this’ being a lonely house and meals eaten alone at the table and quietly leaving the room when her father gets inevitably drunk – instead of being thrown out and disowned by having a romantic soulmate that’s anything other than a guy.

(It doesn’t work.)


	2. watch the waters rise and fade away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Who’s there?” she calls out, and prays that it’s not the last thing she’ll do in this life. There’s a silence, in which Hana can hear the pounding of the river between her ears, her blood rushing through her veins.
> 
> Someone chuckles, then, sounding decidedly feminine. “A friend. Will you turn around?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 2 - Sky: **Dragon AU** | ~~Royalty AU~~
> 
> Tags/Warnings: Dragons

There are stories from the West. Their dragons are four-legged like a lizard and winged like a bird, and instead of storms they raise fire and death. Anyone who has half a brain knows that the stories of the West are false, because then who would protect the rivers? Who would clean the waters and raise the fish and keep the drought at bay?

Which is why when there’s a drought in Namimori, the township do not turn to gods – no, their village is much too small for Susanoo. But there is a dragon-shrine an hour’s walk from the heart of the town that people flock to, bringing their rice wine and the first of their meager crops.

Hana watches them come on the first day, her fisted hands tucked under her long sleeves all the while. The head priest is thrilled, of course – the shrine is reliant on the town for offerings, and the winds here have been unsettled lately. Perhaps this would placate the dragons of the shrine, if nothing else.

She tries to stop herself from looking, but even halfheartedly she can see that her father is not among the suppliants. Whatever hope she’d scraped together falters and dies at the end of the fourth day of offerings.

She’s lighting the stone lanterns of the shrine, driving off the shadows and any creatures of the night off the sacred grounds, when she hears it. A scraping of something on stone. Hana doesn’t turn around suddenly, but she does let her movements slow to a stop, keeping them graceful; let at least some part of her father’s and the shrine’s training aid in prolonging her life.

“Who’s there?” she calls out, and prays that it’s not the last thing she’ll do in this life. There’s a silence, in which Hana can hear the pounding of the river between her ears, her blood rushing through her veins.

Someone chuckles, then, sounding decidedly feminine. “A friend. Will you turn around?”

It’s phrased like a question, but Hana doesn’t need to be seeing their face to know that it’s really not. Slowly she obeys, tucking her hands inside her sleeves, hearing the bell tied to the end of her hair chime quietly.

There’s a dragon there, coiled – hovering! – in the air, scales glimmering a green in the low light that brings to mind shaded forest pools and the green growth of plants beside the river.

More importantly, it’s _the_ dragon, the ones that Hana has been hearing stories of from the head priest since her arrival, and immediately she drops into a bow and holds it. Beneath her sleeves, her hands are trembling, and Hana clutches at her own forearms in order to try and regain control.

“Raise your head,” the dragon says dryly, if a deity in control of the water and rain and storm could be dry. Hana contemplates staying like this, where she can’t offend anyone, until there’s a huff like a rush of what sounds like steam and a sudden breeze –

It’s in front of her, face to face, and Hana thinks at that point she can be forgiven for biting down on a shriek and stumbling backwards until she’s not staring down a god.

There’s a rumble like thunder, lowly and shifting. “There it is.” The dragon sounds pleased, weirdly enough. “I thought your flame had been snuffed out.”

“Wouldn’t you prefer that?” Hana snaps back, trying to ignore the fact that she’s talking back to a god and, technically, her employer. “No fire to challenge your rain’s superiority?”

The rest of the dragon’s coils drifts through the air, but the head stays steady at Hana’s eye-level. “No,” it says mildly. “I rather prefer it – it made you much more interesting than the others, the day you came to my shrine.”

Hana swallows down the deluge of words that rise up in her throat and come to her tongue. She remembers the day she’d been given to the shrine all too clearly, and yes, she’d been _given_. Her father had made sure she’d known that.

The dragon tilts her head, considering Hana, and she wonders abruptly if there are any other powers that haven’t made it into the stories. This being before her is on par with minor deities; it’s more powerful, in some respects, just because of what it does and how it affects the mortals around it. Hana should be doing a lot of things right now, if the head priest’s stories of his encounters with this dragon are any example, but she isn’t a coward. She will not bow and scrape for _anyone’s_ approval, not even if it means she’s courting death.

There’s that low-thunder rumble again. “What’s your name?” the dragon asks just as bluntly.

Hana resists the urge to bare her teeth, instead tempering down the flare of outrage and anger into something that lines with steel the smile she gives this beast. “Names hold power, if you’ve forgotten,” she tells it, which is true. The dragon might hear her name or terrorize it out of one of the other shrine staff, but it will be of limited use, since it will not come from Hana’s own tongue. “And I might be one of your _miko_ but that does not mean I am a thing for you to control.”

“Who said anything about control?” the dragon shoots back, and though it says it mildly enough like before there’s a certain way that the rest of its body fidgets and moves, the tension winding throughout its entire body. “I only wish to know you better. And we both know you are not one of _my_ miko. You are not beholden to anyone; that I can see as plain as day.”

“Awfully smart of you,” Hana says, and she makes sure that it is in the dragon’s own earlier dry tone, cadence for cadence. She shifts her weight on the ground, checking her footing. “Why have you let there be a drought?”

And there’s no doubt in her mind that it had been a matter of _letting_ , instead of being able to stop a drought.

“My brother is away,” the dragon says. Now there’s something under its words that Hana would be tempted to name annoyance if it were human, but it is most definitively not so she refrains from doing so. “It makes maintaining the rain… harder.”

“Nevertheless,” Hana shoots back, “it’s been affecting the crops. We need the rain at this time of year to grow them, not kill them.”

It’s a dragon – a _deity_ – that stares back at her, and Hana feels herself redden when she jerks her accusing glare away to somewhere that will not kill her for her audacity. Gods above and below, she’s yelling at something that can kill her without being asked any questions. No wonder her father had given up on her.

Then it does something that Hana doesn’t expect – the dragon laughs. It’s loud and raucous, harsh and rolling, a thunderstorm that’s brought in four other friends with it. Hana holds herself stiffly and waits for it to finish.

“I like you,” the dragon says, and gives her a smile full of teeth. “You may call me Kyoko.”

It takes Hana a moment to understand that, but when the implications sink in it’s all she can do to keep herself from stumbling. She doesn’t dare and try the name, and still she can imagine the taste of it: a name that’s sharp all the way through.

Kyoko stretches her body, the movement rippling. There’s lightning jumping between her scales and shifting gold in her reptilian eyes. “I’ll see you later, Kurokawa Hana,” she adds, and before Hana can do more than glare she’s shooting upwards toward the moon and her clouds.


	3. everywhere you go, it's hallowed ground

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Does it bother you?” Kyoko asks her one day while they’re in bed, after a spectacular night of what would have made their respective parents swear and disown them.
> 
> Hana cracks open one eye, just enough for her to see in the dark. Kyoko looks as beautiful as she always does, with her pale skin and bright eyes and deceptively tamed hair. “Does what?”
> 
> “That those idiots,” Kyoko huffs, “can’t seem to get the hint that I’m already in a fulfilling relationship, and that I’m _not interested_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 3 - Sun: ~~Enemies to Friends to Lovers~~ | **Secret Relationship AU**
> 
> Tags/Warnings: Fake/Pretend Relationship, Not Really Infidelity, LGBTQ Female Characters of Color, LGBTQ Themes

It’s not like they’re trying to be hide it, but if the Cosa Nostra and the Mafia in general are queerphobic idiots, then, well. It’s certainly not Hana’s fault.

And anyway, it’s not a secret relationship like the romantic comedy movies try – and fail – to set up and justify. It’s just the two of them, her and Kyoko, and the people in the know are the people who are closer to them than their blood family had ever been.

“Does it bother you?” Kyoko asks her one day while they’re in bed, after a spectacular night of what would have made their respective parents swear and disown them.

Hana cracks open one eye, just enough for her to see in the dark. Kyoko looks as beautiful as she always does, with her pale skin and bright eyes and deceptively tamed hair. “Does what?”

“That those idiots,” Kyoko huffs, “can’t seem to get the hint that I’m already in a fulfilling relationship, and that I’m _not interested_.”

Hana smirks and lets her eye fall closed. “Well, it certainly didn’t hurt when you were negotiating with the Falco the other day. I’m serious,” she adds, when Kyoko jabs her lightly in the side. “Flirting is your secret weapon.”

“And you never answered my question. Doesn’t it bother you? That everyone flirts back with me?”

She’s getting ready to make another light-hearted reply before she catches the undercurrents in Kyoko’s tone. It’s not hard; they’ve known each other since childhood. If she’d been anyone else, though, Hana suspects that she would have only heard what Kyoko had wanted her to hear, which is confidence and mere curiosity. As it is, she hears hesitation and a little bit of hurt in there, too.

And that’s unacceptable. Hana rolls so that she’s on top and presses Kyoko’s shoulders into the mattress. Her partner shifts almost reflexively under her, and Kyoko might be highly trained but Hana has always been the physically stronger of the two of them. “It does,” she says before Kyoko can think about fighting the hold for real. “But it helps you do your job, and it’s not like we care about their opinions on your romantic partner, anyway. Not at the end of the day.”

That makes Kyoko go quiet and still, obviously thinking it over even in the dark. Hana leans down enough to press a kiss to her forehead and makes a half-roll, so that she’s on her side but still sprawled possessively across her girlfriend. “And anyway,” she adds, pressing another kiss into Kyoko’s shoulder, “it’s not like they get to have the fantastic sex with you.”

Kyoko laughs, then – _finally_ – and pecks her on the cheek in the return. “No, I guess not.”


	4. an average ordinary everyday superhero

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I'm just your average ordinary everyday superhero_   
>  _Trying to save the world, but never really sure_   
>  _I'm just your average ordinary everyday superhero_   
>  _Nothing more than that, that's all I really am”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 4 - Lightning: ~~Fantasy AU~~ | **Superhero AU**
> 
> Title and summary are from the actual song _Everyday Superhero_ by Smash Mouth.
> 
> Tags/Warnings: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Sickfic

_“I’m going to protect the civilians!”_ the little figure on the screen says, which Hana would think is a sweet gesture except for the fact that she knows the punk. Like, _actually_ know, _I talk to him on a regular basis_ know, instead of whatever bullshit that the superhero fans are saying these days.

 _“_ How’s he doing?” Kyoko asks, and she’s beaming as she sets down the tray, obviously proud of their mutual friend. Hana doesn’t have to push down a scoff anymore – yeah, _that’s_ how much she’s gotten to know the boy behind the lion mask – and instead she reaches for a mug of tea. It’s brewed strong and without any of the milk or cream or sugar or whatever Westerners are adding to their tea these days. It makes the antivirals bearable enough for her to swallow them.

“Just fine,” Hana answers when she’s done, and finally relents enough to smile when Kyoko dips in for a quick peck on the cheek. “He’s holding up well on his own. I think pushing him to the spotlight helped.”

 _“Where’s the rest of your rainbow crew?”_ the villain of the day sneers, and it’s such an overused line that both Hana and Kyoko snort in unison. _“You’re going to need all of them to even have a hope of defeating me!”_

“So… who’s telling him that Chrome’s been sneaking up on him the entire time?”

“None of the press corps better,” Hana threatens the television, “they’re already risking it by running their commentary.”

“I think they got the message after – wait,” and here Kyoko leans in to point at the screen. “There she goes.”

And Hana has to admit, Chrome is good at what she does. She gets in close enough to the villain that all she needs to do is swing at his head to knock him out, and she does. The man goes down like a sack of bricks.

 _“It looks like – yeah, Jim, it looks like while Leo has been playing the role of loud distraction, Lady Fox has managed to knock out Jafar! Another beautiful takedown by two of the world’s finest.”_ Hana doesn’t need to check the bottom of the screen to know who’s talking, and neither does Kyoko; they both let the television run in the background, though, while they get comfortable on the couch.

_“Indeed it is, Tom. I’m sure many of our viewers were concerned that the entirety of the Tenth Generation of the superhero legacy team Vongola did not arrive to apprehend the criminal, but as they said in their press conference two weeks ago, the Vongola have decided to limit their assembling for crises that meet a few strict criteria, much like how the Avengers of the fictional Marvel Universe will only gather for emergencies on a massive scale.”_

_“Which leads us to our next point – we’ve seen Leo, we’ve seen Lady Fox. We’ve even seen Sirocco, Deluge, and Taiyo not even a few days ago, with their signature bickering and combination moves that laid out flat the terrorists in Venice! Which leads us to ask: where are Dione and Sprite?”_

“On the couch at home,” Hana mumbles, “about to fall asleep.” And she is – she’s warm, the couch is comfortable, and Kyoko is at her side running a hand through her hair.

There’s a chuckle from above, even as Kyoko untangles yet another section of hair. “Sleep, then,” she says. “Tsuna promised us two more days before we’re back on the rotation, and you need the rest.”

Hana knows this, but she says “He’d better have” anyway before she lets herself fall asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leo was a nickname from Tsuna’s friends that stuck; the moniker ‘Lady Fox’ was one that a villain called Chrome, which also stuck. The sirocco causes storms in the Mediterranean Sea, among other things. A deluge is a great flood or a heavy downpour. Taiyo is Japanese for Sun, because Ryohei doesn’t put much stock into worrying about superhero names when there’s a world to save. [Dione](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dione_\(Titaness\)) is a name whose mythology is wide and varied. [Sprite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_\(lightning\)) are large electrical discharges above thunderclouds, and are cold plasma phenomena.
> 
> Jafar is, of course, a shout-out to the Disney villain.
> 
> And yeah, Hana came down with a nasty cold. All that traveling around in order to be heroic will still knock you flat on your back if you don’t take care of yourself.
> 
> (I've also been informed by Angelic_Xia that antibiotics aren't for colds, it's antivirals, so that's been fixed. You learn something new every day!)


	5. tie me up (tie me to you)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “If you wanted to bring a little more spice into the bedroom,” Hana says dryly, “then all you’d needed to do was ask.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 5 - Rain: Mythology AU | **Handcuffs**
> 
> Tags/Warnings: Handcuffs, mild violence against non-human entities

“If you wanted to bring a little more spice into the bedroom,” Hana says dryly, “then all you’d needed to do was ask.”

To her credit, Kyoko only jabs her in the ribs with the very hand – well, hand and attached accessory – in response, instead of any of the dirty things that spring to Hana’s mind. “Hana,” she hisses, “this is _not_ the time.”

“I’m just saying!” Hana doesn’t need to look to smash an elbow with a hand that’s not handcuffed to Kyoko’s into someone else’s face, and she certainly doesn’t need to look in order to know they go down clutching at their nose. A swift kick to the head takes care of the rest. “I could’ve gotten us a _much_ more comfortable pair.”

Kyoko doesn’t respond to that, but she _is_ smiling, just a little bit, so Hana counts it as a win. Honestly, the handcuffs haven’t been the strangest part of today – there are witches and flying brooms speeding around overhead, and mountain nekomata threatening to eat people in the background, and she’s pretty sure that Chrome’s slung a marten over her shoulders at one point and didn’t have it eat _her_.

Kyoko pulls them down, suddenly, and Hana follows her into a crouch. A fireball swerves overhead where their heads had been moments before. “If _this_ is what happens when Spanner and Shoichi get their hands on items of vague mythological importance,” Kyoko mutters, “then they’re not allowed to get any tech from the future.”

Hana takes a moment to consider that and the fact that they had, only a few years ago, traveled into the future using the Bovino’s Ten Year Bazooka. “I’m pretty sure that’s already happened.”

“Then I’m going to _confiscate_ them,” Kyoko snarls back, and together she and Hana lunge forward to mow down something with a goat-head and a snake-tail. It spits and the ground smokes where it lands; Hana eyes that and flicks her wrist to extend her bo staff instead of getting too close, and jabs the end of it into the mouth. Kyoko helps her jam it in solidlybefore Hana thumbs the hidden button on her staff.

The staff becomes a javelin, and Kyoko tears it out of the falling body of the monster. “Useful,” she notes.

Hana hears herself making a grudging sort of noise. “Designed by Shoichi, built by Spanner,” she says.

Kyoko laughs at that, even as the ends of her hair starts to rise with static electricity. “When they’re not bringing about endless destruction, they’re being helpful?”

“It’s all or nothing with those two,” Hana returns dryly, and revels in the sound of Kyoko’s laughter.


	6. the most dangerous thing in the room

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone forgets that the true concern in a thunderstorm isn’t the thunder - it’s the lightning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 6 - Cloud: ~~Bodyguard/Hitman AU~~ | **Kidnapping**
> 
> Tags/Warnings: Handcuffs, mild violence

_Honestly_. It’s like they haven’t learned yet. Everyone knows that Hana is a Cloud, so everyone thinks that she’s the one to be afraid of. Everyone thinks that she’s the one to watch.

Everyone forgets that the true concern in a thunderstorm isn’t the thunder - it’s the lightning. Which works to their advantage, in all honesty, but it’s still incredibly annoying when people underestimate her girlfriend.

Kyoko prefers it that way, though, which is one of the only reasons that Hana hasn’t broken out yet. They think that they can tie a Vongola Guardian down to a chair, which is plain insulting. They additionally think that mere iron walls can hold her in a place where she doesn’t want to be, which, okay, the drug in her veins means that the cell is kind of spinning, but she’s fought her way out of an enemy base with a severe concussion before. Compared to that, this is a breeze.

Hana’s also trained with Hibari Kyouya. Every way out of handcuffs, she knows, and every way out of a cell that’s made of regular materials, she knows, too. And that’s before she considers all the techniques that use Cloud Flames offensively.

Which is why Hana feels justified in baiting the guards outside of her door – which is merely more iron bars, making it easy to look into the cell, yeah, but also _out_ – until one of them snaps. “Shut the fuck up!” he yells, banging his baton against the bars. His other hand is on the grip of his gun at his hip, and he looks a moment away from drawing it.

Ordinarily Hana would listen, except that she’s bored and she can feel Kyoko moving upstairs. She starts counting up in her head and smiles instead, making sure to pack it full of teeth in the way that Reborn favors when he’s feeling particularly vindictive. “How about no.”

She’s on fourteen and the guard’s just opened the door and stepped inside, leering at her, when the screaming starts from upstairs. “What the fuck,” he says, his stride faltering.

He’s young, and yet he’s here guarding her – Kurokawa Hana, the infamous Vongola Cloud. He’s working for a new Famiglia, though, an upstart that thinks that its drugs are top-notch and is eager to prove them, and that’ll be their downfall.

Hana springs out of her chair, swinging her picked handcuffs at the guard’s head, before she flicks her wrist and sends the chain in between the wrist cuffs around his throat and tightens it to just this side of threatening.

“Don’t move,” she tells the other guard. He’s gone for his gun, too, but Hana’s moved so that she’s using her hostage as a living shield. They may be the Mafia but these are two young kids – they can’t be older than seventeen, Christ – who are probably as much of a greenhorn as their Famiglia.

“Let him go,” the boy says, his voice panicked over the sound of his partner trying to breathe under the steady pressure that Hana’s applying. The cell is spinning, yeah, but her hands are steady. This isn’t the hardest thing she’s done today.

Hana doesn’t reply, and instead she keeps breathing, keeps counting. She hits thirty-seven before there’s a sudden presence behind the guard she’s having a stare-down with, one that knocks him out without fanfare. “Hana.”

“Kyoko!” Hana grins at her partner in crime, her fellow Guardian, and her girlfriend, and increases the pressure enough that the guard whose throat she’s threatening slumps unconscious. She steps over his body without much care until Kyoko’s got her by the elbow and is helping her out of the cell, one dizzying step at a time. “You’re late.”

“I’m early,” Kyoko returns serenely, though there’s blood on her knuckles. Other than that, she’s spotless. Hana loves her so, so much. “You okay to walk out all the way out of here?”

Hana scowls at the slowly spinning floor. “Yes I can, don’t insult me.”

Kyoko’s laughing – there’s nothing audible but Hana’s leaning in on her shoulder closely enough that she can feel her silent amusement. “I never intended to, Hana.”


	7. sadness? I never knew her

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It starts, like so many things do between them, unintentionally.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 7 - Mist: ~~Bed Sharing~~ | **Fake/Pretend Relationship**
> 
> Tags/Warnings: Fake/Pretend Relationship, Unrequited Crush, Not Really Unrequited Love
> 
>  
> 
> hi yes I’m the captain of the ship “Hana/Kyoko” it’s nice to meet you please join me in crying over these two

It starts, like so many things do between them, unintentionally.

“Hana,” someone hisses to her, grabbing her arm in the middle of her walk to her biology class. Hana would jab the offender in the stomach and twist their arm behind their back until they cried for mercy if she hadn’t felt Kyoko speed walking toward her. “Pretend you’re my girlfriend.”

It’s the hallmark of the best friend; Hana slings her arm around Kyoko’s shoulders without hesitating or breaking her stride, and leans in to whisper in her ear. “Who’s the tail?”

“My bio lab partner,” Kyoko hisses, though there’s a smile on her face that would look natural to anyone else other than Hana, who has been her best friend since kindergarten. “He thinks that I’m single and available to hit on.”

“Well, we can’t have him thinking that, can we?” Hana asks, and brushes her lips over Kyoko’s temple before she can answer. It’s a chaste kiss and one that they’ve shared before, and Kyoko reacts as she’s supposed to, ducking her head to mock-hide a smile.

Someone sputters into silence behind them – probably Kyoko’s unwanted suitor, and Hana doesn’t feel bad at all about leaving him behind in the dust. She turns just enough to spot him rapidly turning red and angry, and doesn’t hesitate before she flips him the bird.

Impossibly, he goes even redder. “Stop antagonizing them,” Kyoko says without looking, but she’s not even trying to be quiet.

Hana knows her cues. She smirks and makes sure to catch and hold the guy’s eye. “But they make it so easy!”

Kyoko swats her on the arm, though it’s light and nowhere near the blows she can dish out in the boxing ring. “I’m serious, Hana.”

“Alright, alright, if you say so.”

* * *

The thing is, it doesn’t stop there. People keep being love-struck idiots when they’re around Kyoko, and Hana suspects it has a lot to do with the fact that her best friend gives out smiles like candy and remembers people’s birthdays with enviable ease. Kyoko is outgoing and friendly and an all-around happiness instilling drug, and it draws people to her like a moth to a flame.

In contrast, Hana is a storm cloud; her resting face has been described as cold and calculating – and as a bitch’s when they’re feeling particularly uncreative – and when she debates people think that she’s arguing. She doesn’t get invited to the parties that Kyoko does, even though she shows up to all of them in order to make sure that no one tries anything with Kyoko that they shouldn’t, or to any of the other girls. It gives her a reputation as a ballbuster.

It gives her a reputation as Kyoko’s significant other, too, which makes Kyoko laugh in public and lean into her side, and apologize in private for the way that she’s using the assumption so shamelessly.

Each and every time Hana waves off Kyoko’s apologies. “I don’t mind doing it,” she tells her best friend one day, when she is particularly unconvinced. “You didn’t mean for it to happen, but it’s a win-win situation. You don’t get asked on dates anymore, which I know you don’t want anyway until after university.”

“What do you get out of it, though?” Kyoko bites her lip, a nervous habit that they’ve yet to break her from, and Hana keeps an eye on it even while she’s listening. “I still feel bad.”

 _I get to enjoy your company_ , Hana thinks but doesn’t say, and instead offers a smirk. “I get to bask in the tears of all the boys and girls who cry in jealousy.”

Kyoko’s laugh is less the gentle tittering that people expect and more the rough barking sort that people associate with Hana instead, but thankfully she ends up dropping the subject. Which Hana appreciates, because she gets distracted by how Kyoko’s face forms dimples when she laughs, and the glint in her eyes that say more than her face ever will–

 _Oh, shit_. Hana bites her lip and jerks her gaze away, thankful that they’re in the middle of a party where she is yet again the designated driver but which allows her to pretend that she hasn’t just been hit with the metaphorical sledgehammer.

Because of course she realizes it when she needs to be sociable and seen in public. Of course she needs to hook an arm through Kyoko’s not a minute later and smile predatorily at the guy who’s been fiddling with a plastic bag tucked up his sleeve.

Of course she’s the one who gets to stare at Kyoko dead asleep, head tucked on her lap and a blanket tucked around both of them and think, _I’m in love with my best friend_.

So Hana does the only logical thing. She buries her feelings – not growing, not in like all of the terrible romcoms that Kyoko loves to hate on, but wide and expansive and _terrifying_ – as far as they’ll go, and tucks away the tenderness somewhere deep.

She does it because Kyoko will want an actual romantic partner eventually. She’ll want to get married and grow old with someone, and even if Hana could be in the picture as a best friend, they know each other too well for them to even _consider_ being legitimate girlfriends.

Which means that it comes completely out of the blue when Kyoko demands over lunch, “What’s gotten into you lately?”

Hana blinks up from her salad, startled from her thoughts of their afternoon classes. “What?”

“I mean all of _this_.” Kyoko waves a hand to demonstrate just how much _this_ encompasses, which is, apparently, all of Hana. “You’ve been thinking hard about something – don’t deny it, you get that little furrow between your eyebrows. And it’s not about academics, either,” she adds, “so don’t use that excuse with me.”

Hana doesn’t close her mouth with a click of teeth, but it’s a near thing. She stabs her next mouthful of rabbit food instead, trying to avoid the urge to drop her gaze from Kyoko’s. “Well, you’re right, it’s not academics.”

“Then what is it?” At Hana’s deliberate glance Kyoko huffs and starts on her soup as well, though she does accusingly point her spoon afterwards. “Are you really going to make me go through the entire list?”

“Please don’t,” Hana says dryly. “I’ve seen your lists. They’re so long, we’ll be here all day.”

“I’d happily do that, and more, if you needed me to.” Kyoko’s lips are pressed together, but her big brown eyes are concerned, and _shit_ , Hana has always been weak for them. “You know I love you.”

She will deny to her dying day that the words from Kyoko make her heart thump in her chest, but Hana conceals it with the ease of long practice. It’s not like Kyoko means it the way that Hana’s traitor heart wants her to mean it, anyway, so it’s better not to think about it. “I know you do. But this isn’t something that you can help me with.”

Kyoko eyes her for a long minute, long enough for Hana to return to her salad in relative peace. She’s just contemplating the croutons and if she wants to drench them in even more dressing first when Kyoko asks, “Are you in love with someone?”

Hana would deny _this_ to her dying day if she didn’t suddenly, embarrassingly, and unmistakably choke on her mouthful. “I’m right, aren’t I?” Kyoko is saying when Hana comes back up for air. She has just enough awareness left to realize that Kyoko sounds sad and resigned, two things that she should never be. Not if Hana has anything to say about it.

“How did you get _that_ idea?” she asks, breathing deep. She’s made sure not to be too clingy – or at least more than what the usual fake relationship demands – and she hasn’t gone out of her way to try and please Kyoko more than she usually does, which the Internet has assured her are two signs of being a love-struck idiot and which she has confirmed for herself through their classmates.

Kyoko sighs and puts down her spoon. “You’ve changed your phone background,” she says quietly. “And whenever people talk about dating, you get a – a twist to your lips, like you want to frown but can’t.”

The former is because her background is now of two cats sleeping, but those cats belong to Gokudera. The latter – well. Hana had been feeling uncomfortable around the dating talk because she was pretending to be in a relationship with an unrequited crush, and the stories of swooning over people from afar had hit too close to home.

But the sticking point is, Kyoko isn’t wrong. “A gold star to the student in green. It doesn’t have to change anything between us, Kyoko.”

“No, it _does_.” Kyoko leans forward to set her elbows on her table and rub the bridge of her nose. “If you love someone else, you don’t have to pretend to be in a relationship with me.”

“You don’t want to date until after university, though,” Hana points out, because it is one of the largest problems that shove their faces at her whenever she entertains the thought of womaning up and confessing to Kyoko. “And I’m not so mean that I’ll abandon you to the wolves just because I went and got a crush on someone.”

“But I’m not so mean that I’ll make you pretend to be with me when you want to be with someone else. And the not dating until after university thing is… complicated. It’s.” Kyoko gives up and scrubs her face, soup long since abandoned. Hana knows the feeling; the salad sits heavy in her stomach. “If it was someone that I knew, someone that I’d known for a long time, who’d understand when I say I want to concentrate on studying instead of going out for a night at the bar, then I’d – I’d want it.”

And fuck if that isn’t what Kyoko says in Hana’s dreams sometimes. “That makes sense. You’re you, though, so I don’t doubt that you’ll find someone like that if you really wanted to.”

Kyoko takes a deep breath like she’s about to go for a dive. “I already have, and I’m looking at her.”

The bottom drops out of Hana’s world, and she doesn’t realize the death-grip that she’s subjected her fork to until Kyoko lays her hand on it. Hana stares at that, at Kyoko’s calloused knuckles juxtaposed over her own, until she can steady herself again. “What?”

“I don’t want to pressure you into anything,” Kyoko says, and there’s an edge of hysteria to her voice that would mean babbling in anyone else but means urgency in Kyoko’s. “I know that we’re only pretending to be a couple because I asked you to. But – but I wanted you to know, before we ‘break it off’ and I need to give the shovel talk to your crush.”

“ _Holy shit_ ,” Hana whispers. It takes her brain a second to reboot, but when it’s done she’s grinning like a loon and she doesn’t care. Holy shit.

Kyoko’s looking at her with concern and wariness and just a hint of fear, so Hana does the sensible thing: she drops her fork and turns her palm so that she’s holding Kyoko’s hand, and brings it up so that she can kiss those calloused, perfect knuckles. Her fake girlfriend – and maybe real girlfriend, if she’s reading this right, if she can _do this_ right – looks shocked.

“You asked me if I was in love with anyone,” Hana says. She can still feel herself smiling, and they’re in the middle of the café and people from uni will see, but right now she doesn’t care. Not if she can have this. “You’re right. I am. It’s you.”

 _It’s always been you_ , the back of Hana’s mind goes, but she keeps the words behind her teeth. Maybe she’ll say them later; they have the time.

That’s the thing that her mind gets stuck on, of all things: they have the time.

Kyoko’s still for a moment, but she’s sharp – she’s always been sharp, as long as Hana’s known her – and surprise starts to dawn on her face. “You’re serious,” she accuses, as soon as she looks like she’s gotten her voice back. “You’re not kidding.”

“Do you think I’d kid about something like this?” Hana demands, because she can still read Kyoko like a book and she doesn’t like the anxiety and uncertainty that she’s seeing. “Would I?”

“No,” Kyoko says softly, and now there’s a smile on her face. “You wouldn’t. Hana, what the hell?”

“I thought it was one-sided,” Hana groans. She doesn’t let go of Kyoko’s hand, but gratifyingly, Kyoko doesn’t let go either. “I thought that – that you weren’t interested.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Kyoko sounds offended, and it takes Hana a moment to realize that she’s offended on _her_ behalf. “You’re amazing, and talented, and nice, and witty, and being with you is like – like being wrapped in blankets. Safe.”

Hana bites her lip and gives into the urge to look away. “Same to you,” she bites back, but the heat and anger’s been bled out of her. “You’re pretty, and everybody loves you. You were always going to be whisking off your chosen partner into the sunset and make everyone else sigh after the lucky bastard.”

“Well, if I have anything to say about it, that lucky bastard is _you_.” Kyoko says it with such a straight face and a prim tone that Hana chokes again, on air this time, and wheezes out laughter. “What? And for the record, I still think that _I’m_ the lucky one.”

It sinks in, then. This is real. Hana is – yes, fuck it, she is _in love_ with her best friend, and her best friend is in love with her. She manages to find a tone from somewhere that’s dry enough to say, “How about we call it a tie.”

When she looks back, Kyoko isn’t beaming or giving her one of those celebrity megawatt smiles that dazzle her opponents into submission. It’s a soft smile, one that Hana’s seen before but rarely, and it occurs to her then that it might be a smile reserved for _her_. “I’ll take that offer if it means I can call you my girlfriend without lying.”

Kyoko says it easily enough, too, that Hana can’t resist the urge to one-up her and lean in to kiss her on the lips, slow and chaste and sweet. “That’s a deal,” she murmurs, and feels Kyoko smile back.


	8. we'll still  be here at the end of things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If she’d been perfect, Hana thinks wryly, she wouldn’t be here in the first place: ‘here’ being on Earth, ‘here’ being in a place where people see so far down to the heart of her that she doesn’t know how she’s still here.
> 
> ‘Here’ being the fact that she’s bleeding out beneath someone else’s hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 8 - Earth/Flameless: **Supernatural AU** | ~~Drugged-up confessions~~
> 
> This starts about twelve to fifteen years after the end of canon, in the ‘fixed timeline.’ Hana and Kyoko have active Flames, though what exactly they are I’ve left purposely vague.
> 
> Tags/Warnings: Unreliable Narrator, Past Violence, Implied Medical Experimentation, Implied Brainwashing (none actually happens), Hopeful Ending

Hana has allergies. Some are on her basic medical paperwork, like the fact that she has a mild reaction to tree pollen and lactose. Others are in the secure ones, the encrypted ones that only the Family gets to see, like her hypersensitivity to anesthesia.

They’re all indications of an underlying problem that’s only partially – a fraction, a sliver – of what is her secret to tell. Hana’s been careful to protect it, for all of these years. But that doesn’t mean that she’s perfect.

If she’d been perfect, Hana thinks wryly, she wouldn’t be here in the first place: ‘here’ being on Earth, ‘here’ being in a place where people see so far down to the heart of her that she doesn’t know how she’s still here.

‘Here’ being the fact that she’s bleeding out beneath someone else’s hands.

“No,” they say, “no, _no_ , Hana you don’t get to die on me,” and she blinks up. The blurry brown-haired image clears up into a brown-haired image with a face, and now Hana is smiling wryly up at them – at her.

“Sorry it was you that found me,” she manages to rasp. She is, she really is. She hadn’t been supposed to be found at all. It means panicking and accusations later. It means she’ll need to leave, later.

Vaguely Hana thinks that it’ll hurt, when she does, far more than it had hurt the previous times. But there’s nothing for it.

She refocuses in time to hear Kyoko snarling back, “Don’t be sorry, be _angry_ , damn it, stay with me!” She sounds desperate, which makes sense. If Hana had been anyone else this absolutely would have been the last few moments of her life; she’s lost far too much blood for cauterization to help, though Kyoko’s hands are crackling with Flame as if she’s considering it.

“I’m sorry,” Hana says again, because there’s nothing else left to say. She won’t be able to say it after, unless the Famiglia refrains from cutting into her to see what makes her tick. “Kyoko, I’m _sorry_.”

The Flame fizzles out from Kyoko’s hands as they curl instead, fingers slippery with blood but still trying to keep pressure on Hana’s stomach. She’s still trying to keep her from dying. Hana lets the touch ground her in the present even as she bites down on the rest of what she wants to say.

Then there’s shouting in the background, and more pain, and orange-brilliant eyes like a wildfire. “No,” someone else is saying, “ _Hana_ ,” their voice quiet beneath the sudden shouting and flare of Storm and Mist, and Rain moving the fastest out of them all to rush to her side and tinge the air with its unmistakable scent.

Tsuna takes her face into his hands and tries to catch her gaze. Hana doesn’t let it work, head lolling to the side to stare instead at his bloodstained shirt. “Stay with us, Hana,” he’s saying, even as someone is yelling for a medic and for Ryohei while Takeshi runs his Rain through her veins.

The Famiglia will be weaker when she goes, but there’s nothing for it. Hana has not survived this long by believing in the better nature of those curious humans who would put themselves above the suffering of others. She manages to whisper, “Can’t,” with a smile she doesn’t feel, before she slips under.

It’s a while before she comes back up – she can always feel the passage of time lost when she’s coherent again, the prickle of it digging deep beneath her skin, but Hana doesn’t groan as she sits up.

She’s on a bed, sheets starched white and pillows recently fluffed up behind her head, and the walls are a soothing Rain-blue. The Vongola Infirmary, it looks like, and Hana casts her gaze about the room to confirm that the door is locked and no one else is here before she lets it settle on the figure slumped in the chair next to her bed.

It’s Kyoko – who else would it be? Who else _could_ it be? Tsuna might be her Sky but even he would be swamped by duty right now, in the unfortunate aftereffect of what happens when there’s an attack on the Famiglia, and the rest of the Guardians would be right there with him. It works to Hana’s favor, though, because when she slips out of the bed with the silence born of millennia of practice and just a touch of what power she has at the moment, Kyoko doesn’t stir.

It’s child’s play to avoid anyone else after that. Hana ghosts through the halls of the Iron Fortress to the Guardians’ domestic wing, noting the extra guards disguised as butlers stationed evenly throughout. Had she been anyone else, they might have caught her. As it is, Hana is the one who’d trained all of them with Hibari’s help, and so she reaches her own room without anyone else being the wiser.

She’s standing in the room, contemplating the personal effects that have slowly but steadily added themselves over the years – a pair of boxing gloves from Ryohei here, a stack of books from Gokudera there, the birthday-gift bag from Chrome slung on the hat-stand in the corner and fighting for space with the scarf from Takeshi and leather jacket from Tsuna – when there’s a flare of Flame in the direction of the Infirmary. It’s Kyoko, of course, startled and angry that when she’d woken up Hana hadn’t been there – it’s much too distinctive to be anyone else.

Hana’s wasted too much time here, mourning for things that had been lost to her the moment her heart restarted itself and her blood began to run again like water from the stone. _Enough_ , she tells herself, and ignores the pain in her chest with the ease of long practice.          

When the search party makes it to her rooms, having followed the spark of Flame there until she’d cut off her soul from the outside world to prevent just that, she’s long gone.

* * *

The Vongola Famiglia might be large and expansive, but Hana is millennia older. She erases her tracks with ease, dropping into safe houses she’d established years ago for papers and resources. Kurokawa Hana becomes the name of a missing person, and Hanrietta Dubois resurfaces from her sabbatical in the mountains to rejoin society.

It’s a trick she hasn’t needed to use for the longest time – not since the last time she’d remade herself into an adult, actually; she prefers starting from the ground up these days – but she uses it without regret. She changes her jawline, raises her cheekbones slightly, darkens the line of her eyebrows and gives her nose a slightly crooked bridge. She looks more stern, when she’s done. She looks like someone who looks out of place in all of her old haunts.

She doesn’t look like herself, which is the point, but it still throws her. She is millennia old, and yet she’d been Kurokawa Hana for all of that girl’s human life. It’s a hard thing to let go of; so if her new guise looks like she has European blood in her ancestry somewhere, then, well. It’s an homage to something that she’ll never have.

But the rebirth does mean that when the Vongola tears the Italian underworld apart looking for her, Hanrietta is across the sea, belly-deep in the worst cities of the West. When the Vongola turns the Chinese Triads upside down, she is visiting old friends in Australia, ones who have long since forgotten who she is but remind her of why she is here. When the Vongola turn their vengeful eyes to the rest of the world, she is tucked safely into the heart of it, where none but those with the power can touch.

She’s not completely in the dark during her self-imposed but necessary exile. Even her backup identities have at least some way of contacting the criminal underworld, ever since her latest human life had gotten entangled in it, and Hanrietta Dubois has a reputation of being from uncertain but powerful origins.

She keeps to more mundane, mortal, _human_ methods of travel, but it pays off. The information broker in Thailand tells her that some no-name Mafia Famiglia got the bright idea to claim that they were the ones to orchestrate her disappearance, before the might of the Vongola came down upon them like the wrath of gods. The thief’s guild in Canada gossip about how a famous Flame-Active like Kurokawa Hana could have gone down without catastrophic collateral damage and thus how foul play must have been involved.

The street kids of Venice keep it simple; they tell her that Vongola have sworn vengeance in her name. It would be a heartwarming fact if one thing hadn’t been emphasized, each and every time the Vongola ran their fingers down the web of their connections for news.

That Kurokawa Hana had to be found alive, _or else_.

It’s not heartening news. The last time someone had insisted on her life, not her death, they had taken great joy in testing every single theory they had come up with on how she’d been able to survive.

The Vongola are not idle, either. Each and every week it seems like they are tracking down yet another lead, even if it is to a dead end. In this form she had repressed and tucked away the Flames that would identify her to any of the Famiglia, but still there are far too many brushes with recognition than she is comfortable with.

So when she decides to rejoin her brethren, at least for a little while, she sheds the mortal skin and reaches for the rest of her power. Feathers fluff up and subside as she shakes her wings, reclaiming them from where she’d folded them away; her awareness comes back to her like the tide of the sea, slow and unstoppable, bringing with it the uncomfortable knowledge of everything in her Domain.

“You’ve returned,” Netzach notes dryly when she greets him, the first she’s seen that will look – for a given definition of look – her in at least one of her eyes without judgment or double-takes. “It took you long enough. How was your latest mortal fancy?”

“Uneventful,” she replies flippantly, and tucks away the memories of Kurokawa Hana. “How were the Principalities?”

“Dreadful.” Netzach folds four of his wings, using the last two to let him hover, and blinks his many eyes in a mimicry of mortal pain. “Why did I agree to watch over them again?”

“If you’ll recall, they were given to us.” This is a new argument, and unfamiliar; she watches him carefully, trying to determine his mood and meaning, but it’s a far more difficult task than trying to read a human’s face. “Why, have they been difficult?”

“There’s this concept I think you’re familiar with, with your trysts to the human’s world.” Netzach waves a wing. “It’s called _free will_.”

She can’t help it – she snorts. “Poor little Netzach, whose Domain is Eternity, can’t stand a little bit of whining from the Principalities.”

“All the humans think that you’re the one in charge,” Netzach hisses, but it sounds like he’s trying to imitate a snake. It’s difficult to make your voice anything other than it had been meant to be at the start of everything, she reflects, and not simply because she has personal experience in the matter. “Which means that the Principalities are following along with them.”

That would make something warm in her chest, if she’d been wearing her mortal skin. As it is, all she feels is fondness for the brats. “You’ll have to deal with them for a little longer,” she tells Netzach, and with no mouth to smile with in the customs of humans, flares a bit of her power to shroud them both in warmth. “I’m not staying for long.”

Netzach eyes her then, with all of the ones that will focus on her, and no doubt with many more that she cannot discern without subjecting herself to a sudden reminder on why opening _her_ many eyes at once after going so long without them is a terrible idea. “You’re going back to the human world.”

“Maybe,” she admits. It’s terrifyingly easy to do so. She might be on the run from the Vongola, and she might need to hide for at least a century or two afterward, but.

There is a reason that they were called into existence, and she is a firm believer in that reason being rooted in the paradoxical humans. She’s spent at least a millennium among them, and yet they keep being unique, no two exactly alike.

She contemplates that the entire flight to the heart of their sphere, ignoring the whispers and stares from the lower angels who’ve likely never seen her before, when she’s interrupted again. “You’re back!” the interloper trills, and she slows down enough for them to catch up.

It’s Metatron, and he doesn’t look a day older – not that he’d grow older in the first place, after his rebirth, but he would not be the first to discover the secret that is their ability to pull at the fabric of the world enough to change their appearance. But she is fond of him, so she says as warmly as she can, “Metatron. So I am. How have you been?”

“Well enough, well enough,” he returns, his wings fluttering behind him. They are expressive and indicative of his mood – they always have been, and she suspects they always will be. “You’ve been exploring the human world, haven’t you? How long as it been, now?”

“About a hundred of the human years since my last visit.” It would make her feel bad if she didn’t feel the urge to fold herself away and make herself smaller in order to understand what it feels like to be one of their divinity-given charges. As it is, she eyes the crowd that have appeared around them, and flicks a wing in annoyance that makes them flinch before she turns back to Metatron. “Why don’t we go somewhere more comfortable to talk?”

By comfortable she means quiet, and Metatron has always been quick on the uptake. He nods agreeably enough and leads the way to an unfamiliar room. “They’ve moved my office since you left,” he says, and waves a wing to indicate the bookshelves filled to the brim with his scrolls. “Said I was going to drown under the weight of the texts. Honestly! As if we could drown!”

“It was probably meant metaphorically,” she reminds him. Each and every one of his writings is always set aflame in her awareness, and the ones in this room are no exception. Some are filled with light, and others not so much, but they are all undeniably written in the holy tongue. Metatron pulls out one of them now and unwinds it enough to find space that hasn’t been written on yet, and looks at her expectantly with at least five of his eyes.

Of course – what else could the Scribe want? Still, she waits until he wilts the slightest of amounts and asks despairingly, “Will you tell me your stories?”

It’s like this every time she returns from one of her explorations into the human world, though sometimes it takes Metatron a while to hunt her down and press her for her testimonies. But this is his job, his calling, and she understands all too well the urge of those. So she says, “Alright,” and launches into a story about a human’s life during the Industrial Revolution. And if it’s a story that she’d personally lived through, then that’s for her to know.

“Made in the image of God, and yet set apart,” Metatron mutters when she’s run out of words to willingly say. He’s always been interested in the humans, perhaps more so than herself. If he were anyone else, perhaps they would have ostracized him. As it is, it simply makes Metratron that much more suitable to his role.

“They are indeed,” she agrees, and though she does not need to she indulges in the human habit of stretching. Metatron looks at her oddly during and after it, but refrains from writing anything down that would even remotely be considered commentary. Good; they must have broken him of that habit, then. “Is that all you needed?”

Metatron doesn’t need to turn to look back at his towering stacks of scrolls, she knows, but he does anyway in habit. His lilting voice is wry when he says “Yes,” and he does not rise when she does, only raising a wing in farewell.

She knows better than to disturb him when he is reaching for yet another scroll, this one singing a slowly rising modern hymn when he cracks it open, and so she leaves him with a candle-sized flame that will linger as long as she remains in the sphere. Telling her stories to the Celestial Scribe has reminded her of her conflicting loyalty between those in the sphere and the friends she’s made in her most recent human life, but even if she misses them, she knows herself too well. If she’d returned to the human world, she’d stay until the ones closest to her died.

She doesn’t think she could handle watching the Famiglia from afar, not without interfering with their affairs. And the rules that the Archangels had set for themselves and everyone below them had been clear: either stay within the sphere in your true form, or fold yourself until you are on par with the humans and never breathe a word of the sphere to them for as long as you live.

And there’s only one angel in the sphere who would be able to answer her question with any degree of satisfaction.

She finds Raziel reading, of all things, a human-made hardcover book. “Is it a good one?” she asks in lieu of a verbal greeting. “I don’t think I’ve read it yet.”

Raziel doesn’t need to angle the cover at her to let her read it, but he does, which tells her just how much time _he’s_ spent with the humans recently. “You probably haven’t; it hasn’t been published yet. Due to be released in 2038.”

She carefully doesn’t ask just how he managed to get hold of a book that won’t be published until two human decades from Earth’s present day, but it’s a near thing. “I came to ask you something.”

“Something related to the humans,” Raziel notes, and closes his book with a feather to mark his place. He still manages to make the snapping sound, even with the feather quietly chiming one of the olden hymns. “Something that you can’t ask the other Archangels.”

She does not have a mouth to smile wryly with, but she sends him the emotion all the same. It doesn’t phase Raziel; pity. “Has there ever been an angel who was accepted as they are in the modern world?”

If he were human, he would perhaps blink slowly. As it is, Raziel’s indication of surprise is a ripple in her awareness, the emotion blinking into existence before dying a quick death. “Not many after the turn of the human’s first century. According to the calendar that most of them use, anyway.”

‘Not many’ is not none, but she still skids away from the flare of hope. Millennia old and hopefully able to claim wiser, she has yet to hear the ‘but’ in this conversation.

“But those who were able to fit were not the ones that were exposed as one of our kind. More often, it was one of the Infernal that did, and those returned to their own realm or were written off as myths.”

“Like we are myths?” She cannot stop herself from snorting. Just because a great majority of the human religions on Earth believe in angels does not mean that they are widely accepted by the human populace itself.

But Raziel simply resettles his many wings. “Yes. And you know that I would be aware if any of our kind were outed by the humans simply by the virtue of my Domain.”

“Of course.” Just as how her Domain is the one that urges her to observe the humans and their curious tenacity, of tucking in their chin and forging onwards in their uncertain mortal lives.

On second thought, it’s not a question of if she’ll return to the _human_ world, only when.

It’s that thought that makes her exchange pleasantries and goodbyes with Raziel before leaving, narrowing her awareness down to that familiar presence. In her concentration, she almost collides into Netzach, but she manages to flip in time to simply make it a close call.

“ _Stars and feathers_ , give me some warning next time,” Netzach wheezes; it’s an accomplishment and a sound that she hasn’t been able to get him to make since the Incident two centuries ago, and so she only sends him smugness and the faintest traces of an apology.

“I was in a hurry,” she answers, mood considerably lifted since she’d seen him last. “But I have your answer.”

Netzach looks at her suspiciously, which she doesn’t think is deserved, but perhaps fair. She _had_ told him the last time that he would be dealing with the whining Principalities by himself.

But those ‘whining’ angels are now wide-eyed and silent, the ones with more readable faces – namely, those with animal or human-like visages – in visible shock.

“I’ll help you whip the Principalities back into shape before I go,” she declares, and while Netzach broadcasts surprise and a quickly-rising vindictive thankfulness, the named angels flock together in terror.

* * *

She tucks the supernatural parts of herself away, when she returns to Earth. Her wings disappear from the material plane that the humans occupy, hidden from sight and from accidental touch. Her font of power recedes from her awareness until it’s just the slightest of whispers at her fingertips, enough to maintain her disguise and let her pull at the rest in an emergency, but no more than that.

After, she returns to where her first home had once been and stares at the ruins. She’s not the only one; here, she’s a mere tourist. One of many who visit the Holy Land, where many of the human religions fight for their right to claim it as their own. She does not understand it, and she does not think she ever will.

Humans are so complex, and paradoxical, and curious, and determined. They fight each other and they fight themselves and they fight against the end that comes to all that is mortal and of the earth. They shine brightly like heaven’s fire, and they blink out of existence so quickly it’s a miracle they’d ever lived.

And yet. Here they stand, millennia later. She has watched them grow, build empires, tear down tyrannies. She has watched them dream of better futures for their children.

As a race, the humans are terrifying. Individually, they are also terrifying.

She is of two minds about returning to the human guise she’d fled. On the one hand, previous experience has taught her that she has been revealed and now there will be only rejection and pain; humans instinctively hate what they cannot understand. On the other, the Vongola have continued to search for her in her absence. They have ripped apart several Famiglia and sent the entire underworld careening; they have drawn the attention of governments and international organizations.

If she allows this to go on, then the Vongola will eventually hit a point of no return. Either the Vindice will interfere with disastrous consequence for all of those involved, or someone from either of the spheres will.

“It’s your choice,” Gabriel says when she calls upon him. His voice has the undercurrents of song, as he always does when he speaks. A habit that he’s yet to break. “It’s up to you.”

Gabriel is one of the first who’d interacted with the humans, and he has since remained a messenger. She trusts his opinion on a variety of matters. Except this one is close to the heart of her; this one has sent her into a spiral of doubt and confusion.

 _Is it a choice, if there’s only one answer?_ she thinks, but does not ask. She was called into being, as was all of her brethren, and yet here they are millennia later worrying about _choices_.

It is ridiculous, as all things involving humans tend to be. She eyes the building that people are bowing to for one last time, allowing herself to see what had been there before time had brought it low as it did all things mortal, before she turns away.

 _I know you,_ Netzach had told her. He had been resigned at her decision, but not truly surprised. _You are what you have been called to be: a master of your Domain._

She would worry about him, if she hadn’t known that the Principalities are now following him properly, as they always should have. Secure in the knowledge that one of her oldest friends and brethren has the support he needs, she allows herself one weakness.

She books a flight to Italy.

* * *

It’s one thing to hear about Vongola’s efforts to find her, and it’s another thing to see them. The Tenth Generation are often in the streets, eschewing convention and protocol and common sense. They recruit the Varia, CEDEF, Cavallone, Shimon. Any and all of the ally Famiglia that will come to their call, they have called, and many more besides.

There are even Arcobaleno asking about her without seeming to ask about anything at all, and it is that fact that makes her pause. The Strongest Seven have resumed living their lives after breaking the curse, and are loosely allied with the Vongola for their help in the entire affair. To be involved in the search for one of their missing is something else entirely.

But if the Arcobaleno are unexpected, then watching Sasagawa Kyoko’s single-minded determination to find her old self is an old and unhealed wound: anticipated, yet painful all the same.

She had come here in a moment of weakness, to see for herself that the Famiglia is still standing and still strong, but she has arrived only to see them aged. Perhaps only one other affair would have caused such pain, though those with the memory do not speak of it; not in her presence, and not in Tsuna’s.

Her fingers curl in at the thought of Byakuran, as it always does. The pretentious bastard; he is representative of all that could have gone wrong with the human race. And yet there Kyoko sits, stroking her fingers down her spider’s web of information, attempting to glean something that isn’t there.

Determination. Persistence. Faith. All things that the humans have, that have drawn her attention and kept it there.

 _Kindness in harshness,_ she tells herself, _endurance in eternity_ , and it is with that thought that she slips into the café that Kyoko is in and takes a seat in the hiding corner, the one with the best sightlines in the room.

She fidgets with the menu while the waitress takes her order, fighting against the feeling in her currently-mortal chest. Reaching for the guise of Kurokawa Hana had been easy; she’d lived it, for twenty-plus years. Staying in her seat is hard, now that she is close enough to see Kyoko’s condition for herself. There are dark circles hidden under expertly applied makeup, stress lines that threaten to crack, a gleam to her eye that has always made her predatory but seems to never have left.

And then those eyes swing over to her, when Kyoko’s table companion leaves and the waitress makes the choice to lean in and whisper in her ear, and Kurokawa Hana watches as Kyoko draws in a harsh breath. She’s been trained by the best, so she doesn’t topple over her chair, but even from this distance Hana can tell it’s a near thing.

Even from this distance she can tell apart the emotions flashing across Kyoko’s face, and she only needs to look a little sideways with her power to see what those emotions are: disbelief, anger, wariness, weariness, hope.

Hana stays in her seat as Kyoko rises and moves across the room in one fluid movement to reach her table. She stays in her seat as Kyoko stands before her, looking down. She stays, even as Kyoko leans in with barely trembling hands to grasp at her shoulders and tug her into a rib-crushing hug.

“You’re alive,” Kyoko whispers. “ _You’re alive_.”

Hana would wheeze if her lungs had the space to breathe. As it is, she raises her arms to hug Kyoko back, keeping an eye on the flux of emotions fairly radiating from the girl for those who know how to look.

But this can’t last. Her time as Kurokawa Hana makes her want to curl further into the embrace and press her forehead to Kyoko’s, but this respite is only temporary, only until Kyoko calls the rest of the Vongola to take what they want from her. So she says, “I’m only here for a little while,” and pretends not to notice Kyoko’s flinch.

And then – and this is what defines the humans; their refusal to fit into a neat box – instead of being hurt like she’d expected, Kyoko becomes angry. “Like hell you are,” she hisses, and though she leans back to look her in the eye she grips Hana’s shoulders so tightly that she is sure there will be bruises left afterwards. “You disappeared for three months, Hana, you’re staying.”

There is fear there, yes, but also anger and determination and worry, and it is so different from the voices she’d heard once upon a ten years ago that Hana blinks and Haniel stops to reconsider. “You can’t stop me,” she eventually says, because that’s true.

And from the flash of hurt in Kyoko’s eye, she knows, too. Still she forges on: “You vanished off the face of the earth. We couldn’t find you in Italy, or Japan, or China, or the Americas. Not even in the Middle East, Hana! We couldn’t find you! _No one_ could find you!”

By this time the enterprising waitress has chased out all other café patrons and closed up shop, barricading herself in the kitchen, and Hana can’t blame her. She is known for her temper and her destructive capability; those in the know, like many in this Italian town are, have learned to anticipate. Perhaps this time last year, it would have meant that Hana could have snapped at Kyoko with words and with weapons and not worried about civilian casualties.

Here and now, it’s a reminder that she has been left alone with Kyoko. With Vongola. “This is why I didn’t want to come back,” she snarls, and pushes Kyoko away – not hard enough to send her flying, but enough to skid, to reestablish her personal space. Kyoko bares her teeth in return but doesn’t move from where Hana had put her. The hurt has moved from her eyes to her face, and she wants to feel pleased at that, she does. Mostly, she feels resigned. “You and the Vongola know what I am, Kyoko. I’m not an idiot.”

“That you’re _what_?” Kyoko bites back. She’s raised her fists and they are crackling with Flame, but for now the posture remains neutrally defensive. Haniel can tell it won’t last. “A friend? Someone we care for? Someone we trust?”

“Someone who shouldn’t be alive.” Haniel means it as a statement, as a fact, but it makes Kyoko flinch again.

Then the Flames wisp out of her hands to reach forward and grab at Haniel’s shirt. “Don’t say that,” Kyoko demands. She’s trying to sound angry, and she obviously is, but she is heart-sick as well. Haniel doesn’t need to look, normally or with a touch of power or otherwise, to know; it’s in the voice. “Who took you?”

The change in Kyoko’s track of questioning makes her blink, which is taken as an opening. Kyoko reaches in for a hug again, this time wrapping her arms tightly around Haniel’s shoulders, and when she whispers there are tears beneath the words. “I’m going to burn those bastards to the ground.”

“What?” Haniel doesn’t return the hug this time, and when there’s no reciprocation Kyoko doesn’t lean backwards; she holds on. “Kyoko, what do you mean?”

“You were gone for three months,” and now Kyoko is snarling with all of the fury surging forward, “and you can’t stay for long. You said you shouldn’t be alive. You didn’t want to come back. You thought you _couldn’t_ come back. So tell me, Hana, _who made you think that?_ ”

 _Oh_. The realization hits Haniel. Kyoko thinks that she’d been kidnapped, held against her will, and then indoctrinated into thinking that she doesn’t deserve to be alive and doesn’t deserve to return to the Vongola. None of those are true, but all of them are valid concerns.

“It’s not that,” Haniel says, and when Kyoko tightens her grip on her she says again, “it’s _not_. But you were there, Kyoko. You know I shouldn’t have survived, three months ago.”

“Are you insulting Ryohei and Takeshi and Shamal?” Kyoko snaps back without looking. There’s a warmth behind Haniel’s back; Kyoko’s wreathed her fists in Flame again.

It shouldn’t hurt to spell it out for her like this, but it does. “I’m saying that they shouldn’t have been able to treat it. I’m saying that you all saw my heart restart and my blood flow again.” Haniel means to say it firmly; she ends up nearly whispering, towards the end. 

“And?” Kyoko says it so fiercely that Haniel almost misses the rest of her words. “So you thought that having a medical miracle was grounds enough for you to leave?”

Fierceness. Desperation. The first saw tooth edges of despair. Haniel frowns at the far side wall and refuses to examine the rest of it. “I thought that you’d react like the rest.”

“ _What ‘rest’?_ ” And there is Kyoko’s anger again, this time firmly redirected away from Haniel and towards those unnamed targets. Kyoko doesn’t tighten her grip but she’s obviously tempted to. “Are _they_ the reason you disappeared?”

 _If I say yes_ , Kurokawa Hana dares to think, _then will she–_

Haniel doesn’t dare to finish the thought. She pulls away from Kyoko’s hug instead, but this time Kyoko backs away willingly. Not far, and not out of arm’s range, but still she backs away. She’s giving Haniel her personal space. Eyeing her with suspicion, checking for injuries, yes, but she backs away.

“You pushed me out of the way of the bomb,” Kyoko says suddenly, “and then you almost died, and then you _did_ die on the operating table a few times, and then we pulled you back from the brink only for you to _disappear_ for three months, and during that entire time I had one thought. _One_ , Hana.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, from apparently dying on Vongola’s operating table to needing a list of names of who to visit with a touch of her power to ensure that she and the sphere stay safe, but Haniel doesn’t let herself become distracted. Kyoko is waiting now, and the both of them know this game but only one has played it for literal millennia.

Haniel grits her teeth but Kurokawa Hana chooses to bite the bullet. “What was it?”

Kyoko looks her in the eye and says, “That I didn’t get to tell you that I loved you.”

Silence. Haniel does not startle but she does lean back, feeling the solidness of the chair and of the wall beyond it. They are out of the way of direct sunlight but it’s still warm. The café still smells of coffee and pastries. Kyoko is still staring at her, her edges bleeding uncertainty, but her stance staying determined.

She is not lying.

“So who do I need to kill,” Kyoko is asking when Haniel refocuses, but there is Flame in her eye and it is more of a statement than a question. “Hana, who reacted so badly to finding out – _whatever_ you’re so desperate for them to not find out that you’d run away instead of solving the problem. A medical miracle would mean that scientists would be interested in it, and you know that we would kick Verde’s ass if he even _thought_ about experimenting on you. So it has to be someone else. Someone that you thought we couldn’t reach.”

“I was afraid of the Vongola,” Hana finds herself saying. Kyoko does not flinch for a third time, but she presses her lips together and no doubt is biting down on her tongue hard enough for it to bleed. “And I was afraid of the information leaking. The Vongola are not perfect, Kyoko, you and I both know this.”

“That doesn’t mean we couldn’t try!” Kyoko doesn’t do wide and sweeping gestures when she’s angry; she compresses. She tucks it away. She hides it, so that when she cuts into someone with her words it comes as a surprise. “It’s not the Estraneo, because we made sure to wipe them out years ago, and Mukuro is a thorough bastard. Who else could it–”

She doesn’t finish, but Hana can see the end of the thought, and it’s confirmed when Kyoko’s expression rearranges itself into something apocalyptic. “The Millefiore. Of course, we should’ve known. They’d already taken you once, in the future that never was. We’d thought that the problem was over, after Byakuran reformed. _Naïve_.”

“The Millefiore are allies,” Hana argues, and even as she does the words still taste like ash in her mouth. “Byakuran is even being helpful. If he expressed interest in my recovery, he would have been seen as being thoughtful, even compassionate.”

Even Byakuran had fallen into the trap of thinking about angels in the stereotypical fashion in that other future, of them having two white-feathered wings and an otherworldly beautiful appearance. She doesn’t doubt that he would have taken a form far closer to what she actually is, though, if he’d succeeded in finding out how Kurokawa Hana had survived all of the interrogation and medical experimentation that his Famiglia had been able to throw at her.

“And he’s the holder of the Mare Rings.” Kyoko looks fit to curse. “Part of the Tri-ni-sette. For fuck’s sake. Yeah, okay, that’s pretty bad. But here’s the thing that I think you’re forgetting, Hana.”

Kyoko leans in, and she burns with Flame. Even in Haniel’s enhanced sight, she is alight with Dying Will. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. Not now, not ever. Not even if I have to fight Tsuna over it.”

She looks so determined; Hana wants to believe her. Haniel has been burned by too many promises of the same to truly do so.

Kyoko seems to sense it, because she sighs violently and scrubs the heel of her hand over her eyes in an uncharacteristic display of weakness. “If it makes you feel better,” she says, “then I won’t make you return to the Iron Fortress, or to the Vongola.”

That’s – ‘unexpected’ would be a mild word. Haniel stares at her. “You’re not?”

“It would just push you into running again, wouldn’t it?” Kyoko sounds level enough, but there’s an edge of resignation there. “So no, I won’t. And I know it’s not my place, but I still want you to promise me something.”

Kurokawa Hana would insist _Anything that doesn’t involve idiocy_. Haniel stares at Kyoko, at her tired eyes and straightened spine, and quietly asks, “What is it?”

“I want you to promise that you’ll keep in contact. I don’t care if you keep secrets,” Kyoko adds hastily, when Haniel is left rapidly blinking. “I promise, I don’t. It’s just – I thought you were dead for three months, Hana. I thought that you were _gone_ , or captured, or, or–”

Or a hundred other things that is a fate worse than death. Hana can fill in the blanks, and even here – in an abandoned café in the middle of Italy with a frantic yet determined girl facing her down – she feels something like happiness, at the thought that Kyoko would allow her this.

Kyoko, out of a hundred other humans that Haniel has known throughout the years, is the one to have at least an inkling of an idea of what she is, and yet let her go.

Belatedly, she realizes. “You said you loved me,” Haniel whispers. It’s a new thought, and terrifying, and yet before she can accept the fact that maybe, Kurokawa Hana could live a life amongst the humans still, she needs to know – “Loved, as in past tense?”

Kyoko stills, a hesitant expression blooming across her face. “No,” she says just as quietly. “Present tense. I still love you.”

Many people have said that to Haniel, over the years, and in many different ways, but none of them have ever said it to her like this: quietly tentative in expressing, fierce conviction in intention.

This is not the end; it can’t be, not when there’s so much more to discuss – not about the sphere and what Hana really is, but more about what will happen next and how they’ll talk to the Vongola so that Hana can keep her secrets – but before that she thinks there’s something more important they need to cover.

Hana makes sure to look at Kyoko in the eye when she says, “I think I’d like to kiss you. Is that okay?”

Kyoko almost doesn’t let her finish. She surges forward instead, crossing the distance in two steps and in half a breath. She tastes like tea in the beginning, the fruit kind that she favors, but the rest–

It’s like stars colliding. It’s like coming home. It’s like a thousand other metaphors that flash through Hana’s mind, each frillier than the last, but they’re all _true_ –

Kyoko leans back, just a little. Her hands are warm where they’re around Hana’s waist. “Stop thinking so much,” she says against Hana’s lips, “and kiss me.”

 “Bossy,” Hana murmurs back, but she does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had fun this week! It was stressful, since I gave myself the additional challenge of trying to make sure the fics went up in time regardless of my being 13 hours ahead of the rest of the crew, but overall I enjoyed myself. I hope you all enjoyed the fics, too - and thank you to everyone who supported me & this fic! It meant a lot to me. <3
> 
> Final notes:
> 
> The nameswitch towards the end of the fourth section is deliberate. Haniel and Hana are not two separate people, nor does the person we start out knowing as Kurokawa Hana suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder. It’s simply a distinction between the experiences of Haniel, the Archangel that has lived since the beginning of time, and the experiences of Kurokawa Hana, the almost-human. It’s a confusing but important distinction to make, because it gives insight into the situation: Hana is a part of Haniel, and Haniel _is_ Hana. Hence the ‘unreliable narrator’ tag.
> 
> “Like water from the stone” refers to the old story in both Judaism and Christianity where Moses cracked a stone in two and sprouted water from it thanks to a divine miracle.
> 
> The portrayal of angels in this fic was inspired by traditional Judeo-Christian (and I believe Hebrew?) angels, as shown in [this lovely comic](http://tomato-bird.tumblr.com/post/172561217436/thank-you-for-reading-purchase-zine-physical).
> 
> [Haniel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haniel) is an actual angel in Jewish lore and angelology. So are [Metatron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatron) and [Raziel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raziel); [Netzach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netzach) is listed as an angel as well, though it is also one of the Sefirot in the Jewish system Kabbalah, and generally translates to – and the angel reportedly has the domain of, alongside Haniel – ‘Eternity.’
> 
> Kudos also to adelmortescryche for reading over a section of the fic to make sure I wasn't being too confusing. You're the best <3


End file.
